


For You, Anything

by quicksilverdeancas (quicksilvermalec)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester (the second one) has friends, Dean is dead, Established Gabriel/Sam Winchester, Fluff, Gabriel and Sam Winchester in Love, I Blame Tumblr, I actually like this, Married Gabriel/Sam Winchester, Other, Parents Gabriel & Sam Winchester, Sam names his kid after his brother, Unrequited Love, and it made me cry so hard, based loosely on a tumblr post, enjoyyyyyyyyyyyy, it also made the beautiful incredulousanteater cry, it's all really gay, love u bae, people are only kind of sad, some other people die too, this fic is kinda beautiful, which is an achievement ;)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 11:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20993975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksilvermalec/pseuds/quicksilverdeancas
Summary: On the 13th of August – the day he died – he just puts one single hydrangea.orIn which death is a fact of life, but that doesn't make it easier to deal with. Sam Winchester has yet to decide whether it gets easier or harder every time he loses his brother.





	For You, Anything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incredulousanteater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incredulousanteater/gifts), [Clearfear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clearfear/gifts).

> Sorry I've been so inactive recently. The last thing I posted was five days ago. I've been having pretty bad block, but I'm feeling pretty good about this. I got to live write with my wonderful friend J, who gave me a wonderful commentary and is really good at making me feel good about myself ;-)
> 
> I hope you guys like this!
> 
> Enjoy

**There are no more prayers. No one calls my name, no one asks for me. I am alone, now, to live in my grief. I protect them, and they keep me sane. I ask for nothing more.**

#~+~#

It’s been almost a decade since Dean died, and Sam has resigned himself to the fact that this time, his brother isn’t coming back. He’s moved on… as much as he can.

He’s long since given up on trying to escape the hunting lifestyle, but when he and Gabriel decide they want a kid, he starts being much more careful. They agree that they won’t let them into the life until they’re at least fifteen, and only if they _want _to be, and with the proper training. (Gabriel’s good at that) But Sam doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t even really want to anymore. He keeps moving, keeps fighting, keeps saving people. He carries on the family business in honor of his brother.

He visits his gravestone twice a year – in January and in August. On the 24th of January every year, he always leaves the cheesiest birthday card he can find for less than three dollars at Target, signed with _I miss you, love Sam_. On the 13th of August – the day he died – he just puts one single hydrangea. Dean may never have been big on flowers, but Sam doesn’t really care. He’s dealing the best way he knows how.

They fill out the adoption paperwork. It takes an extremely long time to go through. Five months in, Gabriel decides to Talk to Sam.

“You need to get him to stop,” is how he starts it. He’s leaning against the doorframe of their bedroom while Sam sorts laundry on the bed. Sam sighs and drops the white shirt of Gabriel’s he was trying to fold.

“I can’t, babe,” he murmurs. “I can’t control him, I can’t load him down with this! He took Dean’s death even harder than I did, and I can’t force him open up about it. He’d probably make my head explode, anyway.” This last is mumbled into a soft pair of pajama pants, fresh out of the dryer. Gabe steps into the room to put a hand on his shoulder.

“You have an archangel to protect you,” he reminds him gently. “And you can’t let him keep doing what he’s doing. He loves you, Sam. He misses you. And the two of you need each other. Call him. Please. I don’t like the idea of him flying around killing everything that ever hurt him.”

“He’s not flying,” Sam whispers.

“Pardon?” Gabe asks.

“He isn’t flying,” Sam repeats. “I gave him the Impala. He’s driving everywhere. I don’t think he’d even want to fly, I don’t think he wants to be reminded of what he was… before.”

Abruptly, Gabriel laughs. “You gave him your brother’s car?”

Sam shrugs. “He needed one, and Dean never liked what I used to do to ‘her’ while he was dead.” It horrifies him slightly that saying ‘he never liked x, y, z that I did _while he was dead_’ isn’t even unusual or disturbing. “He would’ve wanted him to have it.”

Gabe concedes the point. “He would have. Which is all the more reason for you to call him. BOOM, segue.”

Sam sighs again and turns to face his husband. “He and I have different issues about Dean, okay? And I can’t just pile on to what he’s dealing with!”

“Call. Him.” Gabriel isn’t giving him his patient, loving-husband look anymore. He’s transformed into a full-on archangel, very old, very powerful, and very done with Sam’s horseshit. If Sam provokes him, he could very well do it himself.

Sam takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says, knowing that he’s lost this fight. “I’ll call him.” He turns away from the blond and starts talking to empty air. “Uh… hey, Cas. We want you to come back. We need you back.”

Cas appears in front of him, and it’s been so long (two years, four months, and eighteen days, by Gabriel’s extremely helpful count) that Sam starts slightly. He calms his racing heart as Cas smiles at him.

“Hello, Sam.”

_Fuck_. Sam is crying. He hadn’t realized how much he missed his best friend until this exact moment. “Hey Cas,” he chokes out, fighting back his tears. “I missed you, buddy.”

Cas’ face goes carefully blank and his back stiffens slightly, and it takes Sam a full five seconds to realize _oh, right, Dean was the one who always called him ‘buddy’ to make everything seem a little less gay_. “I have missed you as well,” he finally answers, and Sam hugs him.

“Vigilante work was always a little more our humans’ styles,” Gabriel tells him from behind Sam. Sam lets go and takes a step back, and the archangel’s arm snakes around his waist. His hand finds its way to the small of Gabe’s back.

Castiel has the grace (Grace, haha) to look slightly embarrassed. “It’s… difficult. Without him here,” he says finally, and well, Sam isn’t about to begrudge him that. “It is easier to move around, to hunt the things that hurt him. It’s less painful than just accepting that he is…”

“Dead?” Sam supplies bluntly. He feels a pressure in his ribs that is suspiciously similar to an elbow, but he doesn’t look at Gabriel.

“To be overt about it, yes,” Cas replies. “Is this how you felt? When Dean was in Hell?”

Sam purses his lips and nods. “Yeah, pretty much. This is what happens when you grieve for someone. You just hurt forever, and you never really get over it. You get through it, I guess, but it still stays with you until you die.”

“That sounds like a difficult existence.”

Sam sighs, feeling older than he’s ever felt, and inexplicably exhausted. “Tell me about it.”

#~+~#

**I went to Sam with help on hunts the first couple of years. Sometimes I even went to him _for _help on hunts. But he and I hunted different things, and our paths rarely crossed. We would go months without seeing each other sometimes, and neither of us would complain. It was disappointing, if I must admit it to myself, that we no longer had the same close friendship that we used to.**

**I am no longer sure that he saw our relationship that way. But I did.**

#~+~#

They get him when he’s three weeks old. He’s a healthy baby boy, an orphan by all accounts, and they name him Dean.

(Sam names him Dean. Gabriel stands there next to him, doesn’t fight him on his choice, and holds him when he sobs into his shirt.)

Sam thinks maybe he should feel lucky. He doesn’t, though. He feels as though everything has been pulled out from under him and he’s free-falling through nothingness. But he’s lucky, isn’t he? He’s lucky that his brother made it to forty years old. He’s lucky that he got his archangel back. He’s lucky that his best friend is still alive and kicking. But he doesn’t feel like it.

Dean grows up to be headstrong and passionate and trigger-happy, and he looks nothing like Sam’s brother – save the bright green eyes – but something about him reminds both of his fathers so much of his uncle that they almost can’t stand it sometimes. They love him more than anything in the goddamn world, and they both know that they would fall on a blade for their son.

His personality just strengthens their conviction that there is _no fucking way _he’s getting into the hunting life until he’s fifteen, maybe older.

His fifteenth birthday rolls around, and they present him with the opportunity. He goes, “nah, I’m good,” and Sam is both proud and glad that he declined. He doesn’t really want to put anyone else that he loves in danger. Dean goes off and makes real money (honestly, like a good person, a ship that sailed for Sam and original Dean a long time ago) working in an auto repair shop.

(When he comes home to tell Sam with a brilliant spark of joy in his eyes that he got that job, Sam grins at him and tells him that’s awesome and he’s so proud, and he cries himself to sleep that night, buried in Gabriel’s chest.)

((Sam can barely handle the reminders of his brother anymore, even as they get farther and farther from his death. Some days are better than others, but by the time he’s been gone twenty years, Sam is flat-out old, on his last hunting legs – Gabriel fights with him every day over whether he should still be hunting, and Sam always tells him that someone’s gotta do it and all their friends are dead – and every day just hurts like a bitch. There’s a cavity, just below the place Death replaced his soul all those years ago, that Dean used to fill, and now it’s like it’s full of knives, slicing into his skin. Sam may not have always liked his brother, but there was never a day he didn’t love him.))

And then the twentieth anniversary of the day Dean died rolls around. August 13th, 2039. Sam brings Dean his flower and immediately finds a hunt to go on. Gabriel comes with him.

It gets nasty. Gabriel gets restrained (and where the fuck did they find things that can restrain _archangels_?), which means he can’t help Sam when Sam gets overwhelmed by demons. He takes them out one by one, unbinds his husband and then-

He takes an arrow in the back.

Gabe is too late.

The hardest part is when he has to go home and break the news to Dean. Dean decides to become a hunter. Gabriel tells him he doesn’t have to, and he tells him that he doesn’t care. His father did it, his uncle did it, his grandparents did it, and his great-grandparents, too. Saving people, hunting things. It’s always been the family business, and Dean isn’t going to let that die with his father. Dean is 19 years old.

Gabriel respects his decision.

Eventually, after much prodding and way too many rehashings of the same conversation, Dean convinces Gabriel to go back to Heaven. “Dad needs you,” he insists. “He needs you more than I do, Pa. Just… make sure you come back and visit?”

“Of course I will, munchkin,” Gabriel replies, smirking slightly. (It’s not the smirk Sam loved; that hasn’t been seen since he died) Dean groans at the nickname, complaining that he’s an adult, and Gabriel’s smirk widens, but it still isn’t as big or shit-eating or mischievous as the ones that he always gave around his husband. Dean makes note of that, and makes sure his Pops knows that the real reason he wants him to leave is because he hasn’t been the same ever since.

Gabriel has no argument against that.

So he goes back to Heaven, and Dean keeps hunting.

#~+~#

**I am always alone now. I learned ‘through the grapevine’, as I’m sure Dean would say, that Sam Winchester has died. Perhaps someday I shall visit him in Heaven. My brother would surely appreciate that.**

**I haven’t returned to Heaven since long before either of the Winchesters passed on. I never once visited Dean in Heaven. I don’t think that I could handle it.**

**I am afraid that once I make my way to Dean’s Heaven, I shall never leave it. I cannot afford that, not now – there is too much work to be done on Earth. But someday… someday, I will. When I am no longer needed in the realm of the living, I shall retire to my homeland.**

**I wonder if Dean is hurt that I have never come to see him. I don’t think he is. I believe that if I was ever that important to him, I would be present in his Heaven eternally. I like to think that he has been reunited with his brother, now that they are both gone. I like to think that they share a Heaven.**

**I do not like to dwell on it. I must keep moving.**

#~+~#

Dean 2.0 is arguably a better hunter than his father was. He practically lives in the shadows, he can find a hunt in any town, and he’s got his father’s journal, his uncle’s journal, and his grandfather’s journal. He has entire catalogues from his Papa of angelic and angelic-adjacent creatures that he might encounter, creatures that neither his father nor his uncle knew existed until their mid-thirties.

He rarely gets injured on hunts. When he’s 23, he meets a man about his age named Jack. He’s intrigued by him, because in many ways he reminds him of his father Gabriel and his uncle Castiel, but he also reminds him of his human family.

They hunt together for several months. They get very close. One day, sitting on his car (a blue ’09 Nissan), he tells Jack that his whole family is gone.

“Me too,” says Jack. Dean glances over at him.

“My uncle died before I was born. I’m named after him. My dad died a few years ago. My other dad went back to Heaven to take care of him.”

“Back?” Jack doesn’t sound disbelieving, just curious.

“My dad was the archangel Gabriel.” Dean smiles self-deprecatingly and spreads his arms, but no attack comes. After a minute, he drops them to his thighs. “You’re not going to tell me that I’m insane?”

“My father was the archangel Lucifer,” Jack tells him matter-of-factly, craning his neck to stare up at the stars. Dean bizarrely thinks that he’s beautiful. “Castiel was my father, before he disappeared when my other father, Dean, died.”

Dean chokes on his tongue. “D- _Dean_?”

“Dean Winchester.”

“My uncle was your father?”

Jack smiles at him. “You’re Sam and Gabriel’s son, huh? I should have known. You remind me of him.” Whether he’s talking about Sam or Gabriel or Dean, Dean isn’t sure, but for once, he doesn’t mind not knowing, if it means he can keep staring at that smile. “I was raised by Castiel and Dean and Sam. I’m actually much older than I look.” He looks away, turning his eyes back to the stars, but Dean thinks he might have winked at him.

He’s definitely in awe of this guy. He’s not quite sure if he’s in love, but it might not be a far stretch.

#~+~#

**When you come in, I don’t even see you at first. I’ve trained myself to let my eyes slide past people because if I don’t, I will find something that reminds me of one of them in everyone I see. She has Dean’s cheekbones, he has Sam’s eyes, they have Gabriel’s lips. You sit down at the bar next to me and I am vaguely aware that you’re there, but I have no idea who you are, and no interest in finding out.**

**Until someone calls your name, and you turn. I force myself to look at you. You’re blond, quite pale blond, and your hair is shaggy. Not so long as Sam’s was, but longer than Dean’s by a long shot. You’re a little taller than average height – by which I mean, a few inches taller than myself – and you smile as soon as you hear the voice. Your bright green eyes light up when you do, and I think my heart stops.**

**Your name is Dean. It’s not an uncommon name, but it’s not a common one either. I turn back to my drink. I can’t do this to myself.**

**Until your friend says, “come on, Winchester, we have to go.”**

#~+~#

“But we just got here!” Dean tells Jack, and Jack rolls his eyes. (He’s gotten very good at that – being done with Dean’s shit. Dean has a hunch that for every hunter there is an angel that loves them and is exasperated by them in equal measure. It was definitely the case with his parents, and from the stories he’s heard, it was the case with his namesake and his uncle Castiel, as well.)

“And if we don’t leave now, you’ll drink until you pass out.” Jack’s smirking, which he absolutely learned from Dean. (Dean won’t let anyone say otherwise, even Jack himself, who insists he knew how to smirk before he met Dean) Dean can’t help but smile back a little.

“You know me too well,” he concedes. Jack punches his shoulder. “Just one drink?” he asks, and Jack rolls his eyes again.

“Fine, but I’m waiting in the car. And you aren’t driving us to the motel.”

Dean smiles at him and waves him away, and then there’s a voice to his right.

“What is your name?” It’s deep, and it sounds somewhat concerned. He looks at the man it came from. He’s a strange little dude, with messy black hair and x-ray-vision blue eyes. He’s hunched over his beer, and he’s not actually looking at Dean, but somehow Dean knows that he’s the one this guy was talking to.

“Dean Winchester,” he replies quietly. The man inhales sharply.

“You’re hunting a shifter,” the man says. Dean starts.

“How do you know that?” He receives no answer.

“Make sure you have silver on you when you ‘gank the sonofabitch’.” The words sound foreign in this man’s voice, and he puts air quotes around them. Dean snorts.

“Nobody does air quotes, man. What century are you livin’ in?”

The corner of his mouth quirks up. “I have been told that before.”

“Why are you helping me?” Dean demands, utterly confused. It makes no sense to him that this random stranger would give him hunting advice.

“Because I owe you one,” he murmurs, dropping some cash on the counter and pushing himself out of his chair. “It’s the least I can do for you.” He makes eye contact with Dean for a moment and he whispers, mostly to himself, it seems, “you do have his eyes.”

Dean doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. The man grabs the large tan trench coat that was draped over the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. “If you should ever have need of me, just ask for me aloud.”

“Where do I find you?” Dean asks.

“You don’t. I will come to you.”

“What’s your name?”

The man, halfway to the door, turns back to look at him. “My name is Castiel.”

#~+~#

**Your name is Dean Winchester, and you are my best friend’s son, and you are named for the love of my life.**

**I owe you more than you could ever know, purely for existing. I love you more than you can probably comprehend, and you will likely never love my back. He never did. **

**But I don’t even care, anymore. I have a purpose for staying on Earth, for the next twenty years or so. And someday, you’ll go to Heaven with the rest of your family, and I promise – to you, and to Jack, and to myself – that I will finally cease my efforts. I will come with you, I will follow you to the end of your life and beyond, and I will pull whatever strings must be pulled to get the four, now six of us back together once more.**

**I gave up on your namesake, Dean Winchester.**

**I will not give up on you.**

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this whole thing in a day. It's kind of ridiculous. I've had the worst writer's block these past couple of days - I've started five different WIPs so far, and none of them are more than probably 700 words long - and then I saw this one tumblr post this morning and it wouldn't let go of me. So here goes my pushing-through-the-block fic.
> 
> I hope you guys liked it. As always, please give me comments (I love them) and kudos (my lifeblood) and, you know. I'll see if I can post something by Sunday. (I'll do my best.)
> 
> Love,  
-Fake Dean


End file.
